Case Study: How Miu Miu Uses Cultural Merch to Create Impact
The luxury market feels bleak right now. The vibes are bad! Kering - home to former industry hype-machines like Balenciaga and Gucci - is posting double digit losses. The Chanel machine is showing signs of slowing down. The only Maison that actually appears to be coming out on top of the post-post-Covid turndown is Hermès, to no one’s surprise. The Hermès story fits nicely into a broader narrative that’s been going around the industry for the past few years, the one that says growth will happen at the bottom of the market and at the very top. Savoir-faire, craftsmanship, and an elite posture are the key to success in a context when “luxury for luxury’s sake” is losing its meaning for clients.
It’s surprising, then, that one of the Houses making the most noise these days is a 30-year-old newcomer held by the Prada Group. Miu Miu’s made a lot of headlines over the past two years, most recently in the latest Lyst Index ranking of fashion’s top-ten hottest products - breaking a record for any luxury brand. Lyst measures hype, not sales, but Miu Miu’s placement is a testament that brands don’t need to lean on heritage to perform in a tough market. In fact, it’s proof that smart cultural strategy is key to creating long-lasting equity. (And their 82% YOY sales growth in 2023 shows that the performance follows).
1. How Miu Miu Became Number One
Miu Miu’s heat has been building over the past couple years. The brand, launched in 1992 by Miuccia Prada, is one of the few Houses with the original creative director still at the helm. That can be a source of significant power in an industry that sees legacy Houses succumb to the whirlwind of rotating creative directors, falling into dilution or archival curation, not creation.
Since 2020, that prowess has placed the brand at the head of a full on Prep revival, transforming a viral silhouette into a hero product, and then into a proprietary archetype. Miu Miu first showed the now-infamous micro mini skirt in SS22. The House maintained a steady course, renewing the silhouette for subsequent shows and diversifying its momentum by launching collabs with brands like New Balance. By Q1 2023, Miu Miu had a spot at the very top of the Lyst Index for the first time. Ballet flats, cashmere cardigans, and other signature pieces became staples in an early 2000’s, Nu-Prep wardrobe.
Like most luxury Houses, Miu Miu’s success can’t be attributed to product alone. The House has employed an aggressive strategy to build the brand’s cultural capital, tempering virality and visibility with sophisticated activations. The Prada Group - including, doubtlessly, Miuccia herself - has made strong investments into contemporary culture. This places Miu Miu in a legitimate position to make in-roads with the very people who are likely among their most valuable clients, the cultural elite.
In 2011, the brand launched Women’s Tales, a series of short films produced by female directors, which continues to this day. In 2019, the brand held Miu Miu Musings, a series of debates moderated by journalist Penny Martin. Miu Miu’s Summer Reads program followed a Writing Life Literary Club event in Milan this past spring. And most recently, the Tales and Tellers exposition (more on that below) dominated headlines during Art Basel Paris.
Let’s be clear - Miu Miu’s far from the only brand leveraging art and culture in this way. But they’ve unlocked a winning formula to link product, position, and power into a cohesive brand narrative.
2. Cultural Merchandise: The New Luxury Paradigm
Miu Miu’s success is proof that brands don’t need a storied heritage or distinct savoir-faire to survive a bear market. That’s because the main product of many Houses isn’t clothing, it’s culture.
Bemoaning the “death of craftsmanship” has been central to luxury narratives for the better part of two decades. When Terri Agins published The End of Fashion in 1999, she described an industry in which marketing, not superior quality, made a luxury brand. Flashy fashion shows, glossy magazines, and a nascent e-commerce business were threatening to unseat heritage Houses that appealed to a narrow elite.
Agins was writing before the rise of social media. Twenty-five years later, marketing has eclipsed product entirely. Most consumers interact with luxury brands through content, not clothing. Materiality is digital, and the physicality of luxury is the cool smoothness of a screen.
We discover, relate to, and love luxury brands through Instagram stories, YouTube videos, and influencer UGC. Shows are designed to be viewed on a small screen, and art directed with virality in mind. Even in-person activations and “high-touch” retail boutiques are functionally content farms, built to be photographed and shared.
Not everyone can afford to be a luxury client, but when your main output is content, anyone can be a luxury consumer. Fashion becomes a mainstream media, and luxury houses become mass market brands. Like Universal and Disney, they act like conglomerates, diversifying content and messaging into carefully-targeted verticals while maintaining tight control over valuable IP.
Of course, content and clicks aren’t direct revenue streams. But they certainly move products. Many fashion brands have become purveyors of cultural merchandise: products whose main purpose is to signify participation in a brand subculture. You can think of these goods like band t-shirts, or a pair of Mickey Mouse ears. They’re souvenirs of the main event. And while luxury brands don’t put on rock shows, they do produce lifestyle content - and while you’re not paying a ticket price to get in, you are paying with attention.
In an industry dominated by cultural merchandise, the clothes themselves aren’t the end-goal: bringing clients into the brand world is. And Miu Miu’s just proven themselves experts at inviting clients into a space that’s distinctive, targeted, and desirable.
3. Miu Miu's Tales and Tellers: A Case Study in Cultural Strategy
Fast-forward to October 2024. The buzz of Art Basel Paris - the rendition of the international art fair held in Paris since 2022 - wasn’t just significant sales or the recently reopened Grand Palais but the luxury brand activations held for the occasion. Among them was Miu Miu’s Tales and Tellers, a free public exposition conceived by interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga.
The exposition, part of an official partnership with Art Basel Paris Public, drew on films commissioned for the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series, which were brought to life in the Palais d’Iéna in a multi-experiential, continuous performance embodied by characters from the shorts. The exposition also included film screenings and a conference series.
Tales and Tellers felt like something between an art exposition and an immersive, endless fashion show. It drove visibility and engagement for the House, and it did so by leveraging culturally impactful, smart programming alongside singular brand experience and product tie-in.
“Everyone came dressed in Miu Miu, and then there were the actual models,” one of my colleagues told me over brunch last Sunday, “It was impossible to tell who was in the show and who was just visiting.” She was right - and that felt like a very intentional choice on Miu Miu’s part. Even if they hadn’t adopted the brand’s hype aesthetic for the occasion, arrivals to the space were given thick Miu Miu logo stickers as visitor’s badges and asked to place them on their lapels. These had the effect of transforming every look into a Miu Miu one; every person in the space into one of the characters.
This was the great beauty of Tales and Tellers: anyone can become the cultural merchandise, and for free. As one walks through the Palais d’Iéna, one becomes part of the Miu Miu universe, alongside models, actors, and artists. The unstructured space and interactive performance draws you into something that almost feels organic, even real. One could even forget that carefully-placed logos, the movements of the models, even the scale of the exposition demanded to be Instagrammed, and were.
Lest Tales and Tellers forget the product in all of this, Miu Miu seized the occasion to draw upon three years of creative firepower to highlight proprietary silhouettes and distinct aesthetic vision. By placing them in physical space - and dressing them in Miu Miu - the House brought characters from the film series to life and transformed them into branded House archetypes. Clothing is set into motion and meaning as costumed participants tell stories through these silhouettes.
The exercise was repeated in the exposition catalog, which details the films and tells the stories of characters like “L’artiste lumineuse” and “La sorcière” while pairing them with descriptors like, “an electric presence in a black dress with a revealing neckline.” Miu Miu clothing becomes not just cultural merchandise but cultural gear for performance and doing of culture itself, the fashion equivalent of selling Vans outside a skate park.
4. Future Craft
The current downturned state of the luxury market won’t necessarily last. In any case, it’s mostly a financial problem, not a brand one. It’s rooted in macroeconomic conditions in key markets, like the struggling housing market in China and the crunch of the middle class in the US. After two years of remarkable post-Covid growth, we’re simply feeling the effects of a downdraft.
But there’s something more in the air. Consumers are asking themselves what luxury brands really mean in their lives. The top-down cultural authority and dominance that many Houses have enjoyed for centuries is beginning to weaken.
In this context, some Houses will surely return to craftsmanship and savoir-faire. They’ll cite the physical superiority of the goods they sell as proof of value. But that’s not the way forward for everyone, especially at a time when the barriers between consumerism and culture, and between luxury and art, feel particularly nebulous.
Luxury Houses can build long-term brand equity - and value - by embracing their role as cultural actors. They can adopt smart, targeted strategies that make clients feel like they’re participating in something, and that position their products as cultural gear, not just merchandise. To do so, they’ll need to build meaningful partnerships with key movers, expand into new and emerging experiential verticals, and reinject the fantasy of transformation back into their brand promises.
Funnily enough, as I was trying to decide how to finish this piece, I swung outside for a latte and passed a girl still wearing the Tales and Tellers badge on the lapel of her coat. I felt a flash of recognition, and thought about how - like all the best band tees - she was wearing a piece of cultural merch that you’d had to be there to get.
Luxury clients want to feel like they’re participating in something. They’re looking to engage with the world and each other in a way that feels rarified, but not necessarily exclusive. Miu Miu’s proven that there’s a lot of value waiting out there, if you’re willing to open the door.
Case Study: How Miu Miu Uses Cultural Merch to Create Impact
The luxury market feels bleak right now. The vibes are bad! Kering - home to former industry hype-machines like Balenciaga and Gucci - is posting double digit losses. The Chanel machine is showing signs of slowing down. The only Maison that actually appears to be coming out on top of the post-post-Covid turndown is Hermès, to no one’s surprise. The Hermès story fits nicely into a broader narrative that’s been going around the industry for the past few years, the one that says growth will happen at the bottom of the market and at the very top. Savoir-faire, craftsmanship, and an elite posture are the key to success in a context when “luxury for luxury’s sake” is losing its meaning for clients.
It’s surprising, then, that one of the Houses making the most noise these days is a 30-year-old newcomer held by the Prada Group. Miu Miu’s made a lot of headlines over the past two years, most recently in the latest Lyst Index ranking of fashion’s top-ten hottest products - breaking a record for any luxury brand. Lyst measures hype, not sales, but Miu Miu’s placement is a testament that brands don’t need to lean on heritage to perform in a tough market. In fact, it’s proof that smart cultural strategy is key to creating long-lasting equity. (And their 82% YOY sales growth in 2023 shows that the performance follows).
1. How Miu Miu Became Number One
Miu Miu’s heat has been building over the past couple years. The brand, launched in 1992 by Miuccia Prada, is one of the few Houses with the original creative director still at the helm. That can be a source of significant power in an industry that sees legacy Houses succumb to the whirlwind of rotating creative directors, falling into dilution or archival curation, not creation.
Since 2020, that prowess has placed the brand at the head of a full on Prep revival, transforming a viral silhouette into a hero product, and then into a proprietary archetype. Miu Miu first showed the now-infamous micro mini skirt in SS22. The House maintained a steady course, renewing the silhouette for subsequent shows and diversifying its momentum by launching collabs with brands like New Balance. By Q1 2023, Miu Miu had a spot at the very top of the Lyst Index for the first time. Ballet flats, cashmere cardigans, and other signature pieces became staples in an early 2000’s, Nu-Prep wardrobe.
Like most luxury Houses, Miu Miu’s success can’t be attributed to product alone. The House has employed an aggressive strategy to build the brand’s cultural capital, tempering virality and visibility with sophisticated activations. The Prada Group - including, doubtlessly, Miuccia herself - has made strong investments into contemporary culture. This places Miu Miu in a legitimate position to make in-roads with the very people who are likely among their most valuable clients, the cultural elite.
In 2011, the brand launched Women’s Tales, a series of short films produced by female directors, which continues to this day. In 2019, the brand held Miu Miu Musings, a series of debates moderated by journalist Penny Martin. Miu Miu’s Summer Reads program followed a Writing Life Literary Club event in Milan this past spring. And most recently, the Tales and Tellers exposition (more on that below) dominated headlines during Art Basel Paris.
Let’s be clear - Miu Miu’s far from the only brand leveraging art and culture in this way. But they’ve unlocked a winning formula to link product, position, and power into a cohesive brand narrative.
2. Cultural Merchandise: The New Luxury Paradigm
Miu Miu’s success is proof that brands don’t need a storied heritage or distinct savoir-faire to survive a bear market. That’s because the main product of many Houses isn’t clothing, it’s culture.
Bemoaning the “death of craftsmanship” has been central to luxury narratives for the better part of two decades. When Terri Agins published The End of Fashion in 1999, she described an industry in which marketing, not superior quality, made a luxury brand. Flashy fashion shows, glossy magazines, and a nascent e-commerce business were threatening to unseat heritage Houses that appealed to a narrow elite.
Agins was writing before the rise of social media. Twenty-five years later, marketing has eclipsed product entirely. Most consumers interact with luxury brands through content, not clothing. Materiality is digital, and the physicality of luxury is the cool smoothness of a screen.
We discover, relate to, and love luxury brands through Instagram stories, YouTube videos, and influencer UGC. Shows are designed to be viewed on a small screen, and art directed with virality in mind. Even in-person activations and “high-touch” retail boutiques are functionally content farms, built to be photographed and shared.
Not everyone can afford to be a luxury client, but when your main output is content, anyone can be a luxury consumer. Fashion becomes a mainstream media, and luxury houses become mass market brands. Like Universal and Disney, they act like conglomerates, diversifying content and messaging into carefully-targeted verticals while maintaining tight control over valuable IP.
Of course, content and clicks aren’t direct revenue streams. But they certainly move products. Many fashion brands have become purveyors of cultural merchandise: products whose main purpose is to signify participation in a brand subculture. You can think of these goods like band t-shirts, or a pair of Mickey Mouse ears. They’re souvenirs of the main event. And while luxury brands don’t put on rock shows, they do produce lifestyle content - and while you’re not paying a ticket price to get in, you are paying with attention.
In an industry dominated by cultural merchandise, the clothes themselves aren’t the end-goal: bringing clients into the brand world is. And Miu Miu’s just proven themselves experts at inviting clients into a space that’s distinctive, targeted, and desirable.
3. Miu Miu's Tales and Tellers: A Case Study in Cultural Strategy
Fast-forward to October 2024. The buzz of Art Basel Paris - the rendition of the international art fair held in Paris since 2022 - wasn’t just significant sales or the recently reopened Grand Palais but the luxury brand activations held for the occasion. Among them was Miu Miu’s Tales and Tellers, a free public exposition conceived by interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga.
The exposition, part of an official partnership with Art Basel Paris Public, drew on films commissioned for the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series, which were brought to life in the Palais d’Iéna in a multi-experiential, continuous performance embodied by characters from the shorts. The exposition also included film screenings and a conference series.
Tales and Tellers felt like something between an art exposition and an immersive, endless fashion show. It drove visibility and engagement for the House, and it did so by leveraging culturally impactful, smart programming alongside singular brand experience and product tie-in.
“Everyone came dressed in Miu Miu, and then there were the actual models,” one of my colleagues told me over brunch last Sunday, “It was impossible to tell who was in the show and who was just visiting.” She was right - and that felt like a very intentional choice on Miu Miu’s part. Even if they hadn’t adopted the brand’s hype aesthetic for the occasion, arrivals to the space were given thick Miu Miu logo stickers as visitor’s badges and asked to place them on their lapels. These had the effect of transforming every look into a Miu Miu one; every person in the space into one of the characters.
This was the great beauty of Tales and Tellers: anyone can become the cultural merchandise, and for free. As one walks through the Palais d’Iéna, one becomes part of the Miu Miu universe, alongside models, actors, and artists. The unstructured space and interactive performance draws you into something that almost feels organic, even real. One could even forget that carefully-placed logos, the movements of the models, even the scale of the exposition demanded to be Instagrammed, and were.
Lest Tales and Tellers forget the product in all of this, Miu Miu seized the occasion to draw upon three years of creative firepower to highlight proprietary silhouettes and distinct aesthetic vision. By placing them in physical space - and dressing them in Miu Miu - the House brought characters from the film series to life and transformed them into branded House archetypes. Clothing is set into motion and meaning as costumed participants tell stories through these silhouettes.
The exercise was repeated in the exposition catalog, which details the films and tells the stories of characters like “L’artiste lumineuse” and “La sorcière” while pairing them with descriptors like, “an electric presence in a black dress with a revealing neckline.” Miu Miu clothing becomes not just cultural merchandise but cultural gear for performance and doing of culture itself, the fashion equivalent of selling Vans outside a skate park.
4. Future Craft
The current downturned state of the luxury market won’t necessarily last. In any case, it’s mostly a financial problem, not a brand one. It’s rooted in macroeconomic conditions in key markets, like the struggling housing market in China and the crunch of the middle class in the US. After two years of remarkable post-Covid growth, we’re simply feeling the effects of a downdraft.
But there’s something more in the air. Consumers are asking themselves what luxury brands really mean in their lives. The top-down cultural authority and dominance that many Houses have enjoyed for centuries is beginning to weaken.
In this context, some Houses will surely return to craftsmanship and savoir-faire. They’ll cite the physical superiority of the goods they sell as proof of value. But that’s not the way forward for everyone, especially at a time when the barriers between consumerism and culture, and between luxury and art, feel particularly nebulous.
Luxury Houses can build long-term brand equity - and value - by embracing their role as cultural actors. They can adopt smart, targeted strategies that make clients feel like they’re participating in something, and that position their products as cultural gear, not just merchandise. To do so, they’ll need to build meaningful partnerships with key movers, expand into new and emerging experiential verticals, and reinject the fantasy of transformation back into their brand promises.
Funnily enough, as I was trying to decide how to finish this piece, I swung outside for a latte and passed a girl still wearing the Tales and Tellers badge on the lapel of her coat. I felt a flash of recognition, and thought about how - like all the best band tees - she was wearing a piece of cultural merch that you’d had to be there to get.
Luxury clients want to feel like they’re participating in something. They’re looking to engage with the world and each other in a way that feels rarified, but not necessarily exclusive. Miu Miu’s proven that there’s a lot of value waiting out there, if you’re willing to open the door.